Welcome to the OpenSea digest. Let’s look back through the biggest NFT and web3 news of the week.

Art Basel Hong Kong kicks off and showcases digital art

Art Basel Hong Kong 2026 has officially opened from March 27 to 29, with a new global digital art initiative running alongside the main stage. Zero 10 will be making its Asia debut after launching at Art Basel Miami Beach last December. The exhibition gathers works that use software, AI, robotics, and blockchain tools, including NFTs. 

Showcasing artists include Emi Kusano, whose AI-based works examine digital identity, and Claire Silver, whose AI-generated piece “Mary” ran on Nvidia software. Also presenting work is Harvey Rayner, a generative art pioneer whose algorithmic Art Blocks pieces use color, geometry, and historic artistic influences to create evolving visuals. The AI-driven artist collective Botto will also be present to exhibit its Mirror Stages collection. 

Other Zero 10 contributors include artists such as Jonas Lund, Jack Butcher, Tim Yip, Qu Leilei, and All Seeing Seneca, along with DeeKay Kwon’s projection DeePle The People, which will illuminate the Hong Kong Club Building nightly with a digital animation reflecting the city.

Outside of Zero 10, Sougwen Chung is presenting “Recursions,” a performance piece that pairs live drawing with a robotic system to explore the relationship between artistry, data, materials and labor.

NYSE to create tokenized securities trading platform 

The New York Stock Exchange announced a partnership with digital asset firm Securitize to create blockchain-based versions of traditional financial securities.

Securitize will reportedly act as the first digital transfer agent for corporate and exchange-traded fund issuers on an upcoming NYSE-affiliated digital trading platform, helping convert real-world assets into secure digital tokens that record ownership and transactions on a blockchain. 

The companies also say they will collaborate on standards for digital transfer and tokenization, including regulatory, operational, and technical requirements, as U.S. exchanges increasingly experiment with blockchain-based stock, bond, and fund trading.

Tether's gold-backed digital token lands on BNB Chain

Tether, the company behind the widely used dollar-pegged digital currency $USDT, this week announced that its gold-backed token $XAUT is now available on BNB Chain, the blockchain network run by crypto exchange Binance. 

XAUT works by tying each digital token to one troy ounce of physical gold stored in Swiss vaults. The expansion gives BNB Chain's user base direct access to gold exposure that moves and settles digitally.

RIV Coin launches on Solana to connect institutional investors with DeFi

RIV Coin ($RIV), a protocol token built on the Solana blockchain, officially launched out of Dubai as the core token of RIV Capital Group, an international investment group with operations across Europe and the Middle East. 

The token uses a reserve-backed model, meaning capital from token purchases goes into a regulated, segregated fund invested across traditional financial holdings and cryptocurrencies, with the activity publicly visible and recorded onchain. 

The project also includes StablePay, a tool for merchants to accept crypto and convert it to regular currency, and its multi-chain digital wallet, RIV Wallet.

Meta to deprioritize its VR metaverse app to focus on mobile

Meta announced that it would stop supporting Horizon Worlds, its multiplayer virtual reality social platform, on Quest headsets by June 15. After user feedback, however, CTO Andrew Bosworth partially reversed course, confirming in an Instagram story that existing games would remain accessible, though no new VR games would be built.

Meta has reportedly spent around $80 billion on VR-related gadgets through its Reality Labs division since 2021. Its mobile-first pivot now puts Horizon Worlds in direct competition with Roblox, the popular virtual social world platform.

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